2003 November 6 Sacramento Bee David Whitney
Knight Rider/Tribune Business News
Historic Deal on Sacramento, Calif., Flood Control 'Essentially Done'

Nov. 6--WASHINGTON--A historic $420 million deal on Sacramento flood control and Northern California water moved to within an inch of enactment Wednesday when a House-Senate conference committee added it to a must-pass 2004 spending bill.

"This is essentially done," said Rep. John Doolittle, R-Rocklin, who worked out the agreement earlier this year with Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Sacramento.

"You never want to say with certainty that something is done around here, but this is as close to that as it gets," Matsui said. "This bill has to become law, and these projects will be in it."
The fight over flood control had been a difficult and sometimes bloody battle in Congress for a dozen years.

The projects include raising Folsom Dam by 7 feet. That work, together with the installation of new gates on the dam and major levee-strengthening work already under way, will give Sacramento the last major element of American River flood protection sought by the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency.

The deal also authorizes a new bridge over the American River just below Folsom Dam. That will restore a major commuter route that was lost in February when the federal Bureau of Reclamation closed to public use a road on top of the dam because of national security concerns.

It also authorizes $135 million for water projects in Doolittle's district upstream from Folsom Dam. Doolittle will have virtually exclusive control over which projects are funded because he is the only California member of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee through which funding will flow.

Finally, the bill approves enough money to complete levee-hardening work that will soon bring long-sought 100-year flood protection to Sacramento – the magic number required by the federal government to lift the requirement on homeowners and businesses that they buy expensive flood insurance.

It will take more than a decade to complete all the work, but when it's done, Sacramento will have reached SAFCA's minimum goal of 200-year flood protection, meaning the area has a less than one-in-200 chance of a flood in any given year.

Doolittle and Matsui, both with increasingly powerful positions in their caucuses, reached a deal this spring, settling a long and sometimes bitter feud over the best approach for protecting Sacramento from periodic American River flooding.

Flood-control managers sought the raise of Folsom Dam as the final element of a strategy they think will be able to contain the worst likely storms to hit the American River watershed, based on geologic studies reaching back more than 3,000 years.

When all the work is done, forecasts of a giant storm will prompt the opening of the Folsom Dam flood gates to quickly lower the reservoir, filling the river within the hardened levees to maximum capacity. By the time the storm hits, the theory is there would be ample room behind the dam to handle the incoming flood. The 7-foot rise in the dam's height would serve as an additional cushion to assure containment.

Doolittle has been skeptical about that strategy, and has held up authorizing the final work because he believed construction of a multipurpose dam at Auburn would ultimately be cheaper and safer, delivering 400-year flood protection while also providing water and power the area also badly needs.

Doolittle's problem was that an Auburn dam is politically dead in Congress. When the new congressional session opened in January, it appeared the Sacramento region was in for another season of gridlock on flood control until Doolittle surprised everyone by signaling he was willing to cut a deal.

"This is a win-win for the region," Doolittle said Wednesday. "Sacramento gets interim flood control, and we get interim water."

He called the deal "interim" because he said he would continue to work for the eventual construction of an Auburn dam.

Once the deal was cut, it sailed through the House as part of a huge package of harbor and flood-control projects.

But the 412-8 House vote approving the package in September was as far as that bill was going to get this year because the Senate has shown no interest in taking up the measure now. Once that became clear, Matsui and Doolittle went to work quietly on their respective caucuses to have their deal lifted out and approved separately as a rider to the 2004 appropriations bill for energy and water projects.

For that unusual maneuver, Matsui and Doolittle had the state's two well-positioned senators, Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, working that side of the Capitol. Feinstein sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Boxer is a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee that has jurisdiction over flood-control issues.

Together the four lawmakers went to work on committee leaders in their respective chambers to secure the necessary releases so the Sacramento deal could be tacked onto the spending bill.

"Both Senator Boxer and I have been strong supporters of Mr. Matsui's position on this issue," Feinstein said. "He worked out this agreement, and there was no reason why we wouldn't support it."

Boxer said she was pleased to be able to help the effort.

"The people of Sacramento have waited too long for this critical flood protection," she said.

The conference agreement on the spending bill now must be approved by both the House and the Senate, in votes that are typically perfunctory, before going to the White House for the president's signature.